How can you rotate a procedural material?
Following @gandalf3's suggestion above, I switched to having my values affect the texture, restarted all values from scale of 1 and rotation of 0, and then started playing with them until I got something that's sort of acceptable.  It really helped to partition my screen so the node editor was large but above it was the 3D View wherein I had isolated my beam (Numpad /) and had the 3D View set for "Rendered view" That allowed me to see the effect of my changes quite quickly.